MONKS: THE TRANSATLANTIC FEEDBACK
Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios
play loud!productions
Music Documentary
Germany/USA/Spain, 2006, 100 min.

Sat., Aug. 9, 4:30 PM, at the Drama Workshop, Salem Fine Arts Center

Synopsis from the Filmmaker:

The Monks were five American GIs in cold war Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, punk and techno music.

The genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural historic contexts, but also reveals the monks project as the first marriage between art and popular music, and this months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

Why should anybody care about yet another 15-minutes-of-fame 60s band? Because listening to the music you are struck by the pure power and strangeness of it! By the looks of things, it's 1965 but the sound could be 2065, or maybe 1065... at times this music seems to be the root of everything that followed, but then maybe it's more like a dying language spoken by a few practitioners on a remote island. It is: beat music, folk, weird trancey drones, pure raw power. All delivered with notable fervor on the usual guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and... banjo?!

In a written manifesto, the band's manager laid down a code of musical, personal, and ethical conduct for the Monks which had to be adhered to at all times. This included wearing clerical robes and getting those special Monk haircuts. You need to hear them and listen to what they have to say about it now. -ME